Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls,
and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and
the female, as God had commandedNoah. It came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the
flood were upon the earth.
Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes representatives from each species of "every thing that creepeth
upon the earth." Now this must have taken some time, along with expert knowledge of taxonomy, genetics, biogeography,
and anatomy. How did Noah manage to collect the endemic species from the New World, Australia, Polynesia, and other
remote regions entirely unknown to him? How, once he found them, did he transport them back to
the ark?
How could he tell the male and female beetles (there are more than 500,000 species) apart? How did he know how to
care for these new and unfamiliar animals? How did he find the space on the ark? How did he manage to find and care for
the hundreds of thousands of parasitic species? How did he obtain and care for the hundreds of thousands of species
of plants? (Plants are ignored in the Genesis account, but the animals wouldn't last long after if the plants died in
the flood.) No, wait, don't tell me. A miracle happened. Millions of them.
